Nigel Hervey

“giving to steal and cruel kind,

a heart to fear, to doubt a mind,

to differ a disease of same,

conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,

bitter all utterly things sweet,

maggoty minus and dumb death

all we inherit, all bequeath”
― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems

“This is based on no science, pseudo of otherwise, but I firmly believe that the elapsed time between the development of language and creation of the first poem was about five minutes.”
― Thomas C. Foster , How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

“You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.”
― John Coltrane

“The artist or writer does not impose harmony on reality but—with sufficient reverence and diligence and selflessness and solitude—uncovers the harmony that is always there but that we conceal from ourselves out of a preferencia for material comfort and fear of the consequences a full and unreserved embrace of harmony requires. This faith in the underlying harmony roots itself in a love of and appreciation for nature, because nature, no matter how extreme the human abuse heaped on her, embodies a quiet, continual knitting and healing of life, ever dependent on death to make herself anew. 'Art is a harmony parallel to nature,' Cézanne wrote—not identical with but parallel to nature. Art of any kind, undertaken with atención and focus and as part of a commitment to discipline, is an effort at reenactment of the original creative gesture—the precipitation of the universe at the moment of its creation. That, I believe, is why we sing, paint, dance, sculpt, write; that is why cualquier one of us sets out to create something from nothing, and why the creative impulse is essentially religious or, if you prefer, spiritual. We seek to recreate the original creative gesture, whatever or whoever set it in motion—the bringing into being of what is. We seek the center of beauty.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life